


Four Times Mac Wasn’t in New York on 9/11 and One Time She Was

by windandthestars



Category: The Newsroom (US TV)
Genre: 5 Times, 9/11, Gen, Pre-Series
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-06
Updated: 2018-06-06
Packaged: 2019-05-19 00:33:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,174
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14863271
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/windandthestars/pseuds/windandthestars
Summary: For jenni3penny because she said please.I was hoping for a longer piece, but there's only so much digging through the NYPL archives I can do before I start needing to hug everyone.





	Four Times Mac Wasn’t in New York on 9/11 and One Time She Was

**Author's Note:**

  * For [jenni3penny](https://archiveofourown.org/users/jenni3penny/gifts).



> For jenni3penny because she said please.
> 
> I was hoping for a longer piece, but there's only so much digging through the NYPL archives I can do before I start needing to hug everyone.

**One.**  
She knows it’s more luck than anything that they wanted someone as close to the Pentagon as possible as fast as possible and the fact that she’d been in Arlington interviewing commuters for a segment had everything and nothing to do with that. It’s not her first time on camera, she’s been shooting film of herself for months now, but this is the first time any of it makes it to air, the first time it isn’t cut out or reshot later with whichever anchor isn’t on vacation that week.

She should be nervous. She’s seen enough awkward segments, botched sign offs, and painful pauses to know how easy it is to mess up, how quickly she could end up back on the night shift, flipping through another history book from the library, slogging through a stint at the assignment desk. She should be nervous, but she’s always been good under pressure, always pushed back against doubt with determination, so she isn’t nervous. Instead, she’s a little annoyed by how much time she has to spend standing around when she could be making phone calls, even though she knows there are people back at the studio with better connections than her.

They may have better connections than her, but no one’s talking about the story they’d pieced together, the press conferences or the reporting, when she makes it back to the office well after dark, they’re talking about her, how perfectly poised she’d looked, how easy she’d made it seem.

It had been easy in a way, despite the long day, despite the fact she knows she’d rather be behind the camera instead of in front of it. It’d been easy, she realizes, easier for her than the others, the girls with the smeared eyeliner or run mascara, the normally omnipresent men now missing, presumably gone home to their families. She’d been spared the enormity of it all, the first hand accounts and the devastated phone calls. She’d stood in a small patch of grass and recited the facts she’d been given. She’d been spared the collective grief that suddenly settles heavy in her chest as she sinks into the closest chair with a quietly whispered “oh god” as one of the interns continues to insist she must have found the perfect waterproof mascara.

“What’s it called?” She asks once and then again and Mac shakes her head with an ironic smile, almost not answering.

“Heartless Bimbo.” She wagers a guess. “It’s not as bulletproof as you think.”

 

**Two.**  
She sits staring at the TV with a numb sort of disbelief, watching the captions scroll ceaselessly across the screen, the same half dozen images playing on a loop as she tries vainly to figure out what’s going on, here and at home.

There’s not enough information, not enough to go on and too much waiting, too much not knowing for her to settle into any sort of holding pattern. She fidgets, paces, gets up and buys another cup of burnt coffee that she ends up throwing, untouched, into the trash bin in the corner, but she keeps coming back to it, the only source of information she has here in this tiny waiting room squeezed into what seems to be the last bit of free space on this floor.

Her mom’s still at home, preferring to keep herself busy, but Mac hadn’t flown all the way here, promising to wait, to sit and pour over scrapbooks, or help her mom sort through the linen cupboard. She’d flown all the way here to wait, and so she’s waiting, waiting for news on her dad’s routine surgery, waiting for news on what was supposed to be another routine day in New York, waiting and waiting and hoping that everything’s going to be OK.

 

**Three.**  
It’s still one of those things she does out of habit, taking two weeks off to do some work with one of the NGOs her dad had partnered with over the years. It used to be more manual labor, more grunt work, but the last couple of years they’ve been handing her a camera, film or still, or a mic and recorder and asking her to do her thing, asking her to ask questions, bear witness. 

That wasn’t what she did, at the office or elsewhere, but she knows how the equipment works, knows how to ask the questions that should be asked and so she tredges off into the unknown each and every time, blissfully ignorant of the call slips that pile up on her desk in her absence, the emails she has no way of retrieving until she’s back in the States.

It’s a week and a half of radio silence in all but the most literal way, so when she first makes it back into the city, when she first turns on the TV and is confronted with the violence of the aftermath she thinks she must be imagining things, misunderstanding something, because it doesn’t seem possible let alone real.

She can’t, at first, remember what it was she had been doing that morning, what day that had been, what the sun, had felt like, but she knows it couldn’t have felt any different than any other day and she wonders how that was possible, how she hadn’t known, how she had been so blissfully unaware.

It feels like a betrayal not knowing so she flips through the channels, finds something in English, watches and waits until it’s late enough to call New York, and then when no one answers, because it’s 6am on a Friday, calls London, asks questions, and more questions, discovers she’s going to have a hard time getting home, discovers she does remember the day, the morning, what was in actuality her afternoon, the one afternoon it had poured, the rain coming down in sheets, the sound surprisingly soothing. It had enfolded her, lulled her to sleep. She’d slept dreamlessly and woken, unknowingly, in someone else’s nightmare.

 

**Four.**  
She calls her newsroom first, partly because they need to know where she is, that her flight is canceled and she won’t be in, possibly for days, and partly because she wants to know what’s going on, because she knows they have more information than they’re releasing on air, and even though she knows they won’t tell her she wants to ask, wants to try because she needs to know.

No one picks up so she leaves a message, leaves several, one for her boss, and a couple with her coworkers, knowing someone, eventually, will relay the message despite the unfolding, seemingly endless chaos.

She calls her dad after that. He doesn’t pick up and she figures she’ll have to leave a message for him too, start with something that lets him know she’s OK, but then her mom picks up, telling her to hold on over top of the sound of the recording, the tinny request to leave a message.

“Chicago,” her mother echoes and she has to explain again that she’d been in LA for work, that she’d been heading back to New York but missed her connection and so she was still here in Chicago.

“Chicago.” Again, this time with a laugh, a real laugh and Mac bites back a sigh, waits for the explanation. “Twenty six years and this is the first time I’m happy you’re not where you’re supposed to be.”

She was supposed to be in New York, but she wouldn’t have been in Lower Manhattan, but she wouldn’t have been here either, shouldn’t have been here either, no more than she should have been in Boston, or DC.

“I’m OK.” She says without the smile she knows her mom is hoping for. “I’m stranded in an airport with yesterday’s clothes and no food, but it’s fine.”

“Mac.” The admonishment comes on the heels of her frustration and this time she lets herself sigh.

“I have to get a hold of someone at the office. Tell dad I said hi.”

“Said hi—” Her mom starts to complain but she cuts her off, hangs up.

“I love you. I’ll call later.”

She tries the office again, tries a couple of people she knows won’t be at the office, tries a couple of old college friends, and then realizes they’re all on a deadline, pulling something together for tonight’s broadcast or tomorrow’s edition. They’re all on a deadline, except she thinks, maybe, Brian.

She isn’t expecting him to pick up, they’re not exactly friends, they know a lot of the same people and they’ve had coffee a couple of times, but she knows realistically there’s a hundred other people he’d want to talk to before he talks to her. She’s not expecting him to pick up, but he does.

Does she need help getting home? That seems to be why he thinks she’s calling, and while she does, she hadn’t given much thought to that, how much of a nightmare that’s going to turn out to be, but he’s willing to help, make calls for her and relay information. She has a company cellphone and, thankfully, an abundance of quarters, but the battery won’t last forever, and there’s only so much she’s willing to pay to get stuck on hold, so when she finally has a way back to the city, not a flight, but a train ticket, she promises to take him out to dinner.

Just the one time she insists until he relents: to say thank you, someplace nice, but nothing fancy. He agrees to that, tells her to call him if she needs anything else, asks her to call when she gets in and she promises that too.

 

**Five.**  
It’s unbelievable. It’s too surreal to be true, but with the way her heart’s been stuck in her throat she knows she doesn’t have the luxury of denial. She’s sequestered the crying staffers, the ones making frantic phone calls, in the conference room, both to give them some measure of privacy and to keep the hysteria from spreading because she can’t have that.

She’s not the one in charge, not officially, but she’s second best and she’s here and they do have a show to keep on the air, facts to gather and staff to account for, anchors, and reporters, camera people.

It’s a task she’d do herself if she had the time and the patience, but she has little of either and April has a steady temperament and even demeanor that Mac’s forever grateful for. Right now she could put both to better use elsewhere, but she needs to know where her people are and she needs to know now. The reporters farther afield are easier to track down. It’s the ones in the city that are making her anxious, the muted chiming of her BlackBerry alerting her to another message in the chain of emails April’s monitoring.

April keeps her posted as the replies filter in and Mac passes the information on, relieved she’s not the one making the calls about who stays put and who gets out, who ignores the police order to evacuate and who slips out of the city on foot into Brooklyn or heads north toward the office.

The day slips past, too fast and much too slowly all at the same time. There are moments when she finds herself standing transfixed before a monitor, unable to look away from the mounting horror, the rising death toll, and there are moments when she shifts from topic to topic, relaying stats and information, previewing phone calls at a speed that on any other day would make her head spin.

It’s days before she realizes she can’t remember the last she’d fallen asleep, although she has slept, has managed a broken sort of sleep, mostly at the office, too worried about not being able to get back if she left. She’s slept but she can’t remember falling to sleep, she’s been too exhausted for that.

Too exhausted for days, and then weeks, not from the physical exertion of it all but from the emotional toll, the constant reminders and the cloud of unease. It fades, eventually, slowly, as she tucks the memories away, shys away from the reminders when she can until the years pass and Will asks her where she’d been, tips a pint glass in her direction and smiles across the table.

He’d been on TV, his first time behind the desk. She wonders if she’d seen him at the time, but she honestly can’t say although she figures she must have. It didn’t matter what network you worked for, you watched them all, out of the corner of your eye or more directly. She must have seen him, but she apologizes for not remembering, and later, wrapped in his shirt and the worn out blanket on his couch she digs through the archive footage on the network servers until she finds it: _But I'll make you this promise: I'm gonna be with you all night. I'm not going anywhere. I'll be right here._


End file.
